On Ego

Synopsis

What are we? Skin, bone and a hundred billion brain cells? Or is there something more? How does the conscious "you" clamber from the numb darkness of the brain box out into a world of people and places, pleasure and pain, love and loss? On Ego is a beautiful contemplation on love, identity and what it is to be human. Inspired by the book Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks. Mick Gordon is an acclaimed theatre director, Paul Broks is a celebrated neuropsychologist. The innovative collaboration combines art and science to create a moving thought-provoking work to launch Mick's new company, On Theatre.

Our Review:

5 December 2005

Mick Gordon was once the hottest boy on the block, a galvanising artistic director of the Gate, Notting Hill, singled out by Peter Brook for special attention, hauled in by Trevor Nunn to brighten up his middle-aged National Theatre and even called into service by Peter Hall for a stint on Tantalus. Then he disappeared.

Now here he is back with his self-founded new company, On Theatre, and the third in a series of theatrical experiments that started at the Gate with On Death and On Love. On Ego, though, goes further than either.

Part lecture, part love story and poignant drama of a woman dying of a brain tumour, it attempts to encompass every other intellectual strand in between as a teasing sci-fi meditation on, amongst other things, the new art of teleporting, or Time Travel, by any other name. Only trouble is, what do you do when something goes wrong and you end up being duplicated, one of you in one place, one in another – in other word...

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Latest User Review

84.67.85.155) - 6 December 2005:

Carole Woddis has entirely missed the point of On Ego. It's not the authors Gordon and Broks who are insisting human beings are just mechanical and bundles of neurons, without egos or souls, it's the characters Alex and Derek. Their beliefs are then challenged when Alice - wife and daughter respectively - becomes fatally ill with a brain tumour. The play dramatizes this conflict of ideas in a thought-provoking and moving way. Mind-boggling stuff!...

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